


in your glory and your love

by unicornpoe



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, Fluff, Holding Hands, Light Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, of a sort, they have Things to say about heaven and hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 12:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19173589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: Yesterday, the world almost came to an end.Today, the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale are in the park, very much alive.***They will make sure that neither of them has to go up or down again.





	in your glory and your love

**Author's Note:**

> I finished watching the last episode of Good Omens two hours ago, sat down, wrote this fic, and am now posting it with zero (0) beta-ing or editing or ANYTHING. I just loVE THEM SO MUCH AND alksdjfl. 
> 
> Anyway.
> 
> If you spot any errors, feel free to let me know! Also feel free to scream with me about these two because I am OVERWHELMED WITH LOVE FOR THEM. 
> 
> Enjoy<3

Yesterday, the world almost came to an end. 

Today, the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale are in the park, very much alive.

Only very nearly, Crowley knows. It was such a close thing. It was such a close thing all over again, after their respective ventures to Heaven and Hell.

Would’ve been the end if not for some very clever switching. Would’ve been pop, sizzle, splash,  _ over. _

It makes Crowley sick to think about, so he tries not to. He just lets Aziraphale link their arms together, lets Aziraphale pull him close as they stroll next to the duck pond, lets Aziraphale lead him wheresoever his whims decide. Tonight is not a night for temptation, or for wiles; tonight is a night to stand here, breathing next to his best friend, and keep him happy.

Aziraphale is warm, pressed up against Crowley’s left side, warm with the kind of ethereal light that sends heat all the way down to Crowley’s cold-blooded core. It’s… there is a word to explain it, Crowley thinks, but not one that exists in a language he knows. Something like lovely, something like perfect, something like craved; something bigger than all of those things, and another couple of things combined.

It’s funny. They always say that holy things burn demons like him, that anything as heavenly as an angel is like holy water to a demon’s bare skin.

It’s never hurt to touch Aziraphale. Not in any way that’s bad, at least.

Crowley is cold all the time. He takes any little bit of Aziraphale’s divine warmth that he can get.  

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says presently, after they have drifted to a halt beside the large duck pond. His voice sounds hesitant and strange, caught up somewhere in his chest.

Crowley turns his head to look at him, shining softly as he always does in the dusky half-dark. The angel is staring out over the water, carefully not letting his gaze wander in Crowley’s direction, but the grip he has on Crowley’s arm has tightened fractionally. Whatever he is about to say, it’s important to him.

“Yeah?” Crowley asks, after too many moments of silence. There’s a very gentle wind blowing across the pond, and it stirs the soft pale strands of hair atop Aziraphale’s head. It plays so softly with his eyelashes.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale repeats, turning his head a bit more toward Crowley, but still not quite looking at him. “I want you to know that. That.”

He stops. Crowley, whose heart is for some reason ticking up in speed, whose breath is for some reason tightening up into a little ball of tangled air in his chest, tugs on his arm until Aziraphale looks at him the whole way.

“Wha’s that?” Crowley murmurs, quiet, wanting to nudge the information out of his friend. Aziraphale looks deeply, deeply troubled, and that scares Aziraphale; he thinks of what he could have done, what he possibly could have fucked up, to make Aziraphale look like that. His mind speeds forward, drafting up ways to apologize for something he isn’t even sure has happened yet, and he cuts those thoughts off with a particularly vicious mental snarl.

“I just want you to know that I will see to it personally that you never again have to go back there,” Aziraphale says all in a rush, and then snaps his mouth shut with a click.

Crowley stares at him. Aziraphale is looking intently back, the set of his jaw determined, his chin lifted at an angle that is at once defensive and self-conscious and prim—Aziraphale’s particular brand of affectation.

It’s his eyes, though, that catch Crowley’s attention, that keep it. Soft, wet: scared.

“Where?” Crowley says stupidly, even though he knows. He watches as Aziraphale’s eyes widen and he points downwards.

“It’s awful down there,” Aziraphale says quietly, and his hand on Crowley’s arm is weighty and hot. “And I. Well. It’s horrible.”

“It’s  _ Hell,  _ angel,” Crowley says, and there’s something that sounds cracked open and torn apart in his voice, and he can’t stop it, can’t mend it. “It’s meant to be awful. It’s meant to be horrible. ‘S an evil place.”

“I  _ know, _ dear,” Aziraphale says on a puff of air. His voice shakes, too. His hand, curled gently around Crowley’s elbow, strokes down his forearm until he reaches Crowely’s long hand, and then he holds it carefully between his two soft ones. “I  _ know.  _ That’s why you can’t go back there. That’s why I won’t let you go back there.”

Crowley is staring, he knows it. Staring—gaping, really—at Aziraphale, his only friend, his best friend, by his side for six thousand years.

He thinks about Gabriel, how cold his face was, how careless his words were, when he thought he was sending Aziraphale to his fiery death.  _ Shut your stupid mouth and die already, _ he’d said, and the wrath that had coursed through Crowley at those words was unmatched by any he’d ever felt before. He’d thought those same things Aziraphale is saying aloud now:  _ I will never let him come back here,  _ Crowley had thought,  _ I will do whatever I have to do to make sure he doesn’t ever come back here. _

They say that angels and demons burn at the skin of each other. They say that Heaven is fundamentally Good, and that Hell is fundamentally Evil. Crowley hadn’t seen much of a difference, at the end.

_ Our side. _

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, and he is too full of… of  _ something _ to be upset over how completely wrecked his voice sounds. The sun is going down, down; dusk is purple here, and it paints Aziraphale a pale lavender colour, it makes the world beyond Crowley’s sunglasses dim. He pushes them back up onto his head, uncaring for the wreck they make of his hair. “You can’t possibly do that.”

“But Crowley,” says Aziraphale. “They were going to  _ destroy  _ you, my dear.”

Crowley laughs, but it’s dry and rasping, like a spark catching on dry grass, like a blast of slate-coloured nicotine. It isn’t because he’s amused. “And what did you think Gabriel’s lot was going to do to  _ you, _ Aziraphale? What did you think would have happened to you if we hadn’t switched?”

Aziraphale’s smile is small and knowing and melancholy. It makes Crowley want to rage, want to burn things, want to burn  _ them,  _ those that made Aziraphale so complacent to the idea of that sort of end.

“Not much different, I suspect,” Aziraphale says softly. “But I wasn’t up there to see that. I was down there, and seeing what they were going to do to you.” His fingers press hard against Crowley’s hand, a gesture that seems unconscious. “You don’t belong in a place like that.”

Crowley shivers at those words, a bone-deep movement that skitters along his spine. Aziraphale must mistake it as being caused by the very slight chill in the air; he says, quietly, “Oh,” and then, “One quick miracle ought not to be a problem,” and then there is the soft golden whir of Aziraphale’s touch, and they are in his book shop, seated together on his ugly tartan sofa.

Aziraphale is still holding Crowley’s hand.

Crowley wants to close his eyes and climb into Aziraphale’s comfortable lap and just rest, safe and  _ keeping _ safe. He is suddenly so, so tired; exhaustion washes over him in a wave, and he clutches lightly at Aziraphale’s shoulder, staring at him, close.

“You,” says Crowley, continuing their conversation. “You don’t belong up there, either. It’s not…  _ you  _ aren’t… Aziraphale.”

“I know,” Aziraphale says again, and somehow, in a second, his palm is on Crowley’s cheek and Crowley isn’t shaking him off, isn’t rolling his eyes or scoffing. He sinks into the touch like he’s sinking into a hot bath, eyes slotting closed, whole body slumping.

“It’s like you said,” continues Aziraphale. Slow, steady, sure. Crowley isn’t used to Aziraphale being the sure one. “Our side. That is the side we’re on, and  _ this— _ this mad, beautiful world is where we belong. Not up, not down.”

_ Not alone, _ Crowley thinks.

“Not alone,” Aziraphale repeats, and Crowley must have said it aloud then, must have accidentally spoken what was in his mind and his heart; it doesn’t bother him. He opens his eyes.

Yesterday, the world almost came to an end. Yesterday, Crowley almost lost Aziraphale, and Aziraphale almost lost Crowley.

“I think,” says Aziraphale with some of his usual prim tone, mixed in with an aching fondness that is making Crowley short of breath, “that it should be clear by now I’m not necessarily always one for rules. Especially when it comes to you.”

“Me?” Crowley echoes faintly.

“Hm,” Aziraphale says. Here in his bookshop there is none of the otherworldly dusk from outside: there is simply the homely glow of a hearthfire, the orange flicker of a few lamps. As such, Crowley can see the pinkness of Aziraphale’s cheeks perfectly, and he thinks that is wonderful. “You, Crowley.”

“No,” says Crowley, eyes sliding shut again, and then slowly back open. His head spins, and he just hopes that Aziraphale doesn’t let go. “I mean, yeah. Yes. Noticed that, angel.”

Aziraphale’s smile. It’s something that Crowley hadn’t seen often, on that last day—on those last few days. He sees it now, and loves it.

“So I’ll keep you away from down there,” says Aziraphale simply, “and you’ll keep me away from up there. And it’s worth it; a bit of heavenly or hellish disobeying.”

_ I love you, _ Crowley thinks, and once he thinks it, he can’t stop. He has been trying to avoid dwelling upon that fact for six thousand years, after all. It’s built up power, over then, as forbidden things do.

_ A bit of heavenly or hellish disobeying. _

Crowley—because  _ the world almost ended yesterday,  _ because  _ they almost lost each other,  _ because this moment this world this person is where they belong—Crowley kisses him.

“Oh,” says Aziraphale against Crowley’s lips. And then he kisses him back.

_ Doesn’t burn. _

“Is that how it is?” Aziraphale asks, voice shaking on a near-whisper, as he folds Crowley in as close as he can get him.

Aziraphale’s hand is still on Crowley’s cheek, so Crowley reaches up and covers it with his own, presses it closer to his skin. “Angel,” murmurs Crowley, and feels himself smile, and smile, and sigh. “Of course it is.”

**Author's Note:**

> HEY YOU CAN COME YELL ABOUT GOOD OMENS AND STEVEBUCKY AND OTHER STUFF WITH ME ON TWITTER @unicornpoe !!!


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